Castlevania: Belmont's Curse Review: Great Whip, Rough PC Launch

Nine days after launch, Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is already the game people can't stop arguing about. On the critic side it's doing great, with an OpenCritic average in the mid-80s and plenty of outlets calling it one of the better Castlevania games in years. On Steam, the mood is cooler: user reviews sit in the mixed-to-mostly-positive range, roughly two-thirds positive out of close to two thousand reviews, which is a noticeably bigger gap between press and players than you'd expect for a game this polished on paper. Having read through what both sides are actually saying, the split makes sense once you separate "is this a good Castlevania game" from "does it run well on my PC right now."

Pros

• Whip-based combat feels deliberate rather than mashy, with clear wind-up on enemy attacks so timing actually matters instead of button-spam winning fights.
• The Arcana system, where defeated bosses like Death, Medusa and Carmilla turn into usable tarot cards with their own spells, gives real build variety without overwhelming newcomers.
• Seven weapon categories plus offensive and defensive relics mean loadouts genuinely change how a fight plays out, not just the numbers behind it.
• Art direction and music land the classic Castlevania mood, especially the shift from the series' usual stone castles to 15th-century Paris.
• A custom difficulty mode makes this one of the more approachable entries for players who've bounced off harder Castlevania games before.

Cons

• Difficulty pacing is inconsistent — several reviewers describe a brutally hard opening followed by a back half that gets trivial once the level and gear systems kick in, while others had the opposite experience entirely.
• Crowded rooms and backtracking through earlier areas start to feel like padding by the midgame rather than meaningful exploration.
• Launch-week PC bugs carried over problems that were already present in the pre-release demo and never got ironed out.
• A chunk of the negative Steam reviews are about stability and input issues rather than the game's design, which is dragging the user score well below how critics rated it.

Performance & PC

On paper the PC specs are modest for 2026: minimum is a Core i5-8400, 16GB RAM and a GTX 1650, recommended bumps that to a Core i5-10400 and an RTX 3060, both on Windows 11 with DirectX 11 and about 10GB of storage. In practice, launch week was rougher than those numbers suggest. The most common complaints are black screens that stop the game from starting at all on high refresh-rate monitors, random crashes to desktop, and odd input glitches where menus or the map drift on their own or register inputs nobody made, with the mouse cursor sometimes staying visible mid-gameplay. None of that shows up in the system requirements, and it's clearly a big part of why the Steam score sits lower than the critic average.

Steam Deck fares a little better — Valve currently lists it as "Playable" rather than fully "Verified" — with players reporting occasional frame-rate dips, some antialiasing artifacts, and UI elements that get cut off at certain resolutions.

What changed since launch

Konami shipped the first title update, 1.001.002, on October 21, just a week after release. It specifically targets the black-screen-on-launch issue affecting high refresh-rate monitors, though Konami's own notes caution that it may not fully resolve the problem in every setup. Several other issues remain open as of this writing: a cross-save problem between Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC that can overwrite save data if you switch between them, a separate launch failure on Steam and Xbox PC when V-Sync is off with an uncapped frame rate (the current workaround is to temporarily drop your monitor's refresh rate below 60Hz, enable V-Sync, then switch back), the Steam Deck UI cropping mentioned above, and a title-screen freeze for players running the game in Arabic, which can currently only be worked around by switching the system language.

How it compares

If you want tighter, faster combat wrapped in a roguelite loop instead of a linear story, Hades still does that better, trading Belmont's Curse's persistent gear and map for permanent meta-progression between runs. Mistfall Hunter is a closer size comparison — a similarly scoped action-adventure from the same release window — though it leans harder into atmosphere and exploration than Belmont's Curse's combo-driven whip combat. And if the itch is for something far bigger and considerably more punishing, Elden Ring is the obvious next step up, with Belmont's Curse serving as the much shorter, more linear, and far less demanding cousin in the action-RPG space.

Summary

Strip away the PC problems and Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is a genuinely well-made entry in the series — thoughtful combat, a clever Arcana system, and presentation that nails the tone. The catch is that a meaningful slice of the people actually playing it on Steam right now are running into crashes, black screens, or input weirdness that has nothing to do with how good the level design is. Konami's first patch addressed one of the bigger issues within a week, which is a decent sign for where this settles once a few more updates land, but it's not quite there yet.